Chapter 1 #2
With a sigh, she opened the letter and skimmed her mom’s familiar, precise, neat script. There were the usual miss-yous and love-yous, each one like a stab to Raven’s gut.
A few lines toward the end caught her eye. I’m coming to get you, her mom had written. With everything that’s happened, it’s too dangerous for you there.
Her heart lurched in her chest. Fumbling for the envelope, she rechecked the date stamped on the front. Almost three weeks ago. Her mom said she was coming, for the first time in three years.
So where was she?
I’ve tried to call and message, but the connection has been spotty this last week. Things are bad. Everything is falling apart out there. I’m worried this is it. The end.
The Settlement is a safe place for us. There are good people here. It is well-fortified. Until I come, wear your mask. Be careful. If, for some reason, I’m prevented from reaching you, then come here. Find good people you can trust. Whatever you do, don’t be alone.
I love you.
The Settlement, where her mother had found refuge, was a self-sustaining New Age commune located near Elijay in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Georgia, a hundred miles or so northwest as the crow flew.
It was dangerous for a woman to travel alone, especially through gang-controlled Atlanta, but now? With all this? Millions of people spreading sickness, disease, death to anyone who got too close.
The world had gone mad again. And things were so much worse than the last time, and the time before that.
Raven balled the letter in her fist and crumpled it between her fingers. Her hands trembled, her knuckles whitening.
Had her mom already tried to come for her? If so, she hadn’t made it. Had something happened to her?
Her jaw clenched. Old pain sprouted in her gut, tangling her stomach into knots. What did her mom know? She thought she could ride in on a white horse and save everyone, yet she hadn’t bothered to visit in all this time.
Raven could handle things just fine on her own. She’d been taking care of herself for years, since long before her mother had left, always seeking something else, something better, always searching for the perfect life she’d never been able to find here at home.
Steeling herself, Raven stuffed the letter in her pocket next to the whittling knife. She was far too busy to worry about her mother right now.
She took a deep breath, then slipped to the edge of the roof, crouched, and leaped to the ground. It was a long drop, but she softened her legs and curled into a roll before scrambling to her feet.
She brushed twigs, pine needles, and mulch from her pant legs, then whistled one long note, then two short ones—Vlad’s signal for food.
Behind the tiger house, in a fenced area off-limits to visitors, she could draw close to the eighteen-foot-tall fence.
The rest of the enclosure was circled by a deep ditch, surrounding a six-foot-high perimeter wall on the tiger’s side, with a four-foot-tall wall on the visitors’ side, which provided the illusion of unobscured proximity.
Vlad typically lounged on a rock shelf beside his shallow bathing pool. A thin trickling waterfall streamed above him. The rocks were a polymer replica airbrushed to look authentically aged and weathered, while the waterfall poured from a hidden PVC pipe.
At her approach, Vlad rose lightly to his feet and sauntered up to the fence. He eyed her, his ears pricked, waiting impatiently. She pulled a piece of dried venison from her cargo pocket and held it in front of him.
Vlad chuffed in approval. Normally, tigers ate raw meat. In particular, Vlad enjoyed beef, cow femurs, and horse meat, along with turkey and chicken necks, which aided his dental hygiene.
Lately, Vlad had developed a taste for jerky, specifically deer jerky. She took several steps back and hurled a few pieces over the fence.
Vlad’s head snapped toward them. He pounced, snapped his jaws shut, and inhaled the venison in the blink of an eye.
Vlad prowled back to the fence and pressed his enormous body against it, chuffing eagerly for a good petting like some hugely overgrown house cat.
Tigers didn’t purr when they were happy or content. Instead, they chuffed, which sounded a lot like a cough.
Carefully, Raven pushed her fingers between the metal bars and scratched his thick fur along his flank, far from his sharp teeth.
He chuffed encouragingly. She felt the solid bulk of him, his muscles taut as cables beneath the lushness of his fur.
No matter how tame he acted, she could never let her guard down, not for a second. Vlad was a magnificent creature; he was also a voracious and efficient predator.
Once, she’d seen him leap into the air and take down a hawk in mid-flight, a full twelve feet off the ground. The poor hawk had made the unfortunate decision to fly over Vlad’s enclosure.
This particular tiger had an appetite for his human keepers.
At his last home in Dubai, Vlad’s uber-rich owner would parade him before his aristocratic friends on a gold chain during decadent parties—until the aggrieved tiger had had enough and attacked two people, killing one and maiming the other in the seconds it took a security guard to raise his tranquilizer gun and dart him.
Maybe that’s what they deserved for forcing an obstinate tiger to socialize. More likely, they’d taunted and abused him to the point of desperation, until he finally struck back.
She withdrew her hand. The tiger turned his great head, ears flicking, and gave her a lazy stare, as if affronted. His tail twitched rhythmically behind him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
His ears flicked.
“That’s what I thought. I’m the only one who feeds you treats, remember? What would you do without me?”
Vlad blinked one yellow eye.
“That’s right. No more attitude from you, big boy.”
He chuffed again. It almost sounded like he was chuckling, like he was as amused by her as she was by him.
She lowered her voice. “I’m going to miss you most of all. Don’t you dare tell anyone—”
A loud shout splintered the air.
Raven jerked her head up, stiffening, expecting a lecture from her father for shirking her responsibilities for ten minutes to play with the tiger again.
But the shout hadn’t come from her father. In the distance, the head zookeeper, Zachariah Harris, approached from the stone pathway that circled the perimeter of Haven Wildlife Refuge.
Zachariah was hunched over. He stumbled along the path near the bobcat enclosure, about one hundred yards from where she stood next to the tiger house.
Raven hadn’t seen him in days, not since he first started coughing. He’d immediately quarantined himself, holing up in his loft above the Grizzly Grill, Haven Wildlife Refuge’s only restaurant.
Her father had claimed it was only the flu. Not the other kind of sickness. The kind he didn’t want to talk about or acknowledge. He’d insisted the refuge was still safe, that everything was fine.
Everything was about as far from fine as one could get.
Shielding her eyes with her hand, she watched in alarm as Zachariah moved toward her. He faltered, regained his footing. Kept moving.
Instinctively, she took a step backward, off the path, toward the fence line. She yanked the wrinkled mask from her cargo pocket and slipped it over her nose and mouth, hooking the straps behind her ears. It felt incredibly flimsy. She cursed herself for leaving her latex gloves in her room.
“Zachariah, you’re sick! You need to stay away—” Her voice broke off, her throat closing like a fist.
Zachariah had worked at Haven as head zookeeper for fifteen years, as much a fixture as Vlad the tiger or Electra, the park’s old arthritic bobcat.
The Zachariah she knew was a spry and cheerful white-haired man in his late sixties, his face scored with deep wrinkles, his eyes always sparkling with good humor.
This Zachariah was something different.
His bloodshot eyes bulged. The veins in his eyes had burst; his eyeballs glistened crimson. Blood smeared below his eyes and marred his slack mouth. His skin was gray.
Raven took another step back. A small part of her registered that she was too near the fence, Vlad pacing in his cage at her back. The horror of Zachariah’s condition blotted out everything else.
Zachariah shuffled closer. Fifteen feet away now.
“Stay back!” Her spine bumped against the fence. Frantic, she glanced to the right and left for an escape route.
Behind her, Vlad stalked angrily, his tail twitching. He gave a low uneasy growl. To her left was the deep moat where Alex, the twelve-foot alligator, lounged in his large pond. Only his prehistoric predator eyes and broad snout appeared above the waterline.
To her right, Zachariah blocked her path to the rest of the refuge. She glanced back at the tiger house, at the tree she used to scale the roof—surely, an old man couldn’t climb up after her—but he moved too quickly and cut off that avenue of escape, too.
She was effectively trapped.
And he was coming straight for her.
She shrank back. “Stay away!”
Zachariah lunged at her.
For an old, sick man, he was impossibly fast. Before she could react, he seized her arms with an iron grip.
“Help me!” Zachariah shouted inches from her face. Blood-flecked spittle struck her cheeks, landing on her eyelashes. “Please! Help!”
His hot hands burned her bare arms. His whole body radiated a terrible heat, as if his insides had burst into flame. She tried to wrench from his grasp. He was strong, impossibly strong.
Terror spiked through her. The face mask was a flimsy safeguard, practically useless with Zachariah this close. If a single microscopic droplet entered her system through any orifice—her mouth, nose, eyes, or ears—she knew what would happen.
She’d watched the news reporting the overrun hospitals, the suffering people left to perish in their homes, the millions of sick and infected—then hundreds of millions, then billions. All of them, dying in the throes of agony.
“Help me—please!” he cried.
“Let me go—!” Raven struggled to break free, to no avail.
Zachariah coughed again, splattering bloodied phlegm onto her ear and the side of her neck.
His cheeks were spidered with swollen, pulsing, purple-black veins, as if there were worms inside him, rotten worms squirming beneath his skin, his diseased flesh.
In the enclosure behind her, Vlad was working himself into a frenzy. Snarling, he slammed against the fence, the metal rattling against her spine.
“Raven!” Her father ran up the path from the direction of the park entrance. He was dressed in grungy white overalls, a gray T-shirt, and tall black boots, with a work belt around his waist. He held a tranquilizer gun in his right hand. He waved his arms wildly. “Get away from him!”
“I’m trying!”
“Zachariah!” her father ordered. “Stop! Now!”
For an instant, the force of his command startled Zachariah from his sickened fugue. His grip slackened. Raven pulled away and dashed to the right along the fence perimeter.
Vlad snarled and hurled himself against his cage. The fence shuddered from his considerable weight. The tiger’s claws scraped the metal fencing mere inches from where her head had been a moment before.
Zachariah stood in confusion, swaying unsteadily on his feet. She pushed past him and fled past the waist-high fence ringing the alligator moat to the stone path before pausing at the tiger house, which she could climb to safety if Zachariah came after her again.
Frantic breaths tore from her chest. “Dad, be careful!”
Her father circled the old man until he stood between her and Zachariah, the tranquilizer gun gripped in both hands.
“He has it,” he said, his voice bleak. “The virus. It’s here.”